Plenković: Komšić's election in Bosnia and Herzegovina will not contribute to good relations

In spite of being elected to represent Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tri-partitive Presidency, many Bosnian Croats feel that Željko Komšić’s election is illegitimate and that he does not represent their interests as he was elected mostly by Bosnian Muslim voters in the Federation. The Federation is a Bosnian Muslim and Croat political entity which forms a majority of the Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territory, while the rest is comprised of the Bosnian Serb entity, Republika Srpska. Komšić was born in Sarajevo to Croat father and a Serb mother. His maternal grandfather was a Chetnik, a hardline Serbian nationalist movement known for its brutal war crimes.

Commenting on Sunday's general election in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the beginning of today's cabinet session, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said that High Representative Christian Schmidt's decision to make minor changes to the controversial election law on Sunday would contribute to a fairer election process in the future. However, he once again expressed his dissatisfaction with the election results: "We feel that this is bad. This is the fourth time now. It's been effectively twenty years now, and of that twenty, sixteen in which Croats have been represented by someone, who is a Croat from Bosnia and Herzegovina, but not one the majority of Croats in that country voted for. This injustice definitely does not contribute to good relations."

After his surprise move on Sunday to slightly alter Bosnia and Herzegovina's election law Schmidt held a press conference in Sarajevo today, at which he said that the changes were needed because the elected government in the Federation has been dysfunctional for the past four years. He also emphasized that a major reform of the election law is still required: "There is some disappointment that the election law still requires changes. This is not my task. The changes that were made are not a massive reform of the election law nor constitution, that task is still very necessary and this must be done. I hope that with this decision I have brought about the conditions for Bosnia and Herzegovina to receive candidate status for EU membership. Ideally, that would happen by the end of the year."

Meanwhile, speaking on Croatian Radio today, Foreign and European Affairs Minister Gordan Grlić Radman commented on President Zoran Milanović's claims that the election results in Bosnia and Herzegovina were a fiasco and that the Plenković government is to blame: "When we take a realistic look at the effort invested, and that results have been achieved, and to understand this we need to listen to the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, then the only thing we can say is that unfortunately President Milanović is nothing more than a poser and a politically disoriented man, who has now found himself in a quagmire of his own lies, delusions and misjudgments."

Source: HRT